Man with a Seagull on His Head

by Harriet Paige

  Twelve

  Ray was sitting on a bench in Green Park with a pigeon on his lap; Grace might easily have spotted him, had not panic and guilt clouded her eyes.

  The bird had caught his attention as he’d approached the bench because it hadn’t flown away as he drew near. Even when he sat down it had stayed there, right beside his foot. It moved only a little, turning in a small uncertain circle. It was then, as its head came briefly into the soft light of a nearby lamp, that he noticed its eye was hurt.

  “You poor thing,” he whispered, his own eye throbbing in sympathy. He reached down and tentatively stroked its feathered back with the tips of his fingers. He had never touched a bird before. It didn’t flinch, so he ran his palm lightly along the length of it. And still it didn’t try to move away. In fact it seemed glad of the contact, pressing its body into his hand to meet his touch. It was this reaction that prompted him to try picking it up. He bent down and cupped his hands gently around its breast and, meeting no resistance, brought it up to his lap. Its claws scrabbled for a moment on the thin, smooth cotton of his pyjama trousers and then tucked in neatly under its body as it settled down. He kept his hands cupped around the bird, feeling the small skeleton beneath the soft feathers, and beneath that the quick beat of its tiny heart.

  There he sat with the pigeon on his lap. If he had looked up he would have seen the flat in which he had spent the last ten years of his life, just a short distance across the park and the only one in the building with a light on in the front room. Despite the many years ahead in which he would wander this city, he would never return there, or even to this park. In fact, his memories of the place would be almost entirely limited to those that filled his head at this very moment, clear not only because they were of events that had only just occurred but because they were arriving in a mind almost entirely free of other memories.

  For many years now there simply hadn’t been room for them, for anything other than what had been placed before his eyes in that moment in which he’d knelt upon the shingle at East Beach, Shoeburyness, on the 12th of June 1976. Less than a moment: a moment between moments. Stuck in the passage between one heartbeat and the next he had seen and remembered everything. If you cannot forget, you cannot move on. It had filled him up entirely. But now he had been struck on the head again. Not by a bird falling from the sky but by Grace Zoob. And what had filled him was emptying away. He felt it physically, like something draining from his body; even the awareness of it being something worth keeping hold of was already lost to him forever. And there in the empty chamber it left behind remained only the events of the past hour, in which he had woken to see Grace Zoob’s face looming over him and had felt her fist smack into his eye and the sting it left behind and had known instantly that he needed to leave that place. On his way out he had automatically taken his jacket from where it hung beside the front door and as he walked though the dark passage beneath the apartment building he’d slipped it on, reaching his hand into the pocket where he felt the silky threads of a tie that was rolled up inside. He’d held onto it tightly, for the draining sensation had already begun and was making him feel faint. Perhaps it was this that had caused him to head for the first bench he saw and to focus his dizzy mind upon this poor pigeon.

  In time the pigeon’s eye would heal and no longer give her pain, although it was clear she’d lost the sight in it. The other eye saw clearly enough, but having only one affected her balance and prevented her from flying. She didn’t even seem interested in trying, despite Ray’s encouragement. But even if she had been able, the pigeon wouldn’t have gone far. From the plaintive look with which her good eye fixed him on that bench in Green Park, Ray understood that the pigeon both wanted and needed to be near him. And maybe the pigeon understood that Ray needed the same from her. As time went on, that look would develop into one of affection, even love.

  Pigeon would teach Ray a lot about living on the streets. She would teach him how to scavenge for food, how to take what he could find and the places where people left it out. She would teach him the best places to hide away and bed down for the night, and how to keep warm and safe, burying his head in the crook of his arm, his jacket wrapped wing-like around him. She would teach him to take what he needed from people but otherwise to stay out of their way. They didn’t need company. Pigeon shied away from the other pigeons as much as Ray did from other people, and Ray felt the need to protect her from those other birds with their proud chests and their small sharp beaks, which he suspected were the cause of his friend’s injury. If ever they came across a large flock he would lift her up and tuck her away in his pocket, stroking his thumb over the little round head and tattered wings, muttering to her in the coos and soft throaty warbles that would come to take over from words.

  Thirteen

  Ten years after George Zoob walked into the sea at Brancaster Beach, Mira Zoob was an orphan. Although not technically, for her mother died on the day of her eighteenth birthday. She couldn’t remember exactly when cancer had been diagnosed but it couldn’t have been long after George’s death, for Mira struggled to recall a time when it hadn’t been there. Fighting it replaced art collecting as her mother’s occupation, although she wasn’t much good at it. They moved out of London to a cottage in Oxfordshire and Mira went to a school for girls who wore green blazers and grey felt hats. She made a career out of shocking her teachers and classmates, which wasn’t hard. Bored by the usual transgressions, she started a witches’ coven, performing skyclad rituals in the woods and teaching her Pony Club friends to kiss with tongues. She soon tired of that too, though. Leaving it to her now-devoted protégées she became studious and solitary. She walked for hours alone beside the little river that meandered through the fields below the cottage. Sometimes her mother joined her, but the two of them were no longer close. Grace was too busy with the cancer, that demanding but never-mentioned guest in their house. She attacked it mostly with books on new nutritional theories, which lay half-read all over the cottage, and culinary equipment: juicers and sprouters and blenders. There were treatments at hospitals. Poisons injected into her body which she railed against but submitted herself to all the same. Before Mira was considered old enough to look after herself, she would be taken to the elderly couple next door while these treatments were taking place and taking their toll. They would give her mugs of milky tea and try and put her to bed in the middle of the afternoon.

  Although she had a stubborn determination to beat the disease, her mother had no real desire to live, a truth that reached Mira only as an underlying atmosphere in the house, persuading her to find ways to be out of it as much as possible. The cottage was cluttered and dusty, the air stale. No amount of sprouted mung beans could fix the damage done by grief and sadness and loss of hope.

  Eventually they moved back to London, where Grace thought she would be in more competent hands. Back to the apartment overlooking Green Park, stripped now of all its artwork. Mira had only vague memories of the place, most of them based on the pictures—monsters and faces and strange abstract shapes that her childish imagination had invested with animal or human forms—and her father, George, who sang to her sometimes at night and nuzzled his big nose into her eye sockets. None of them were triggered by this empty white box in which she found herself spending more and more time alone. Her mother was more often than not at the hospital and, at seventeen, she was now old enough to look after herself. Eventually it was clear that her mother wasn’t coming home.

  Sometimes Gregoire du Feu, who was painting a portrait of the dying Grace in her hospital bed, would come back to the apartment with her. He was a bastard, her mother was right, but she liked the way his smoke filled the apartment and that he didn’t treat her as a child, showing no respect for her age or the usual rules of discretion. They would return from the hospital in a taxi together and sit in front of the large bare windows overlooking the park, just smoking and drinking whisky.

  “You k
now I always rather fancied your mother. Never fucked her, though. Never tried. I think she wanted me to though. I think she wanted me to at least try. And fail of course.” He laughed.

  “What about my father?”

  “George? Oh, beautiful George. What a cowardly bastard, leaving the two of you.”

  They sucked on their cigarettes and Mira tried to copy the way he exhaled, drawing his lower lip up to send the smoke above his head.

  “You were such a beautiful child,” he said, crossing his legs. They were facing each other in two black leather chairs, their whisky glasses on the small round table between them. “I fantasized about you. I fantasized about getting into your little panties. Does that make me a bad man?”

  Two weeks later, Grace nearing the end, Mira lost her virginity to him. She knew it shouldn’t have happened but it did and it carried on happening. For a while they were lovers. There was only the sex, the cigarette, and the glass of whisky. Nothing else. He didn’t try to be tender or pretend to be in love with her, which she appreciated. She couldn’t have coped with that. When he touched her, her body responded in a way that terrified her at first. She didn’t know it could do that, that she was capable of that level of sensation. All her nerves spiralling down to a little ball of fire, as if she was the centre of the world. That her memories of her mother’s funeral should be tied up with the taste of Gregoire du Feu’s cock was something she later profoundly regretted, but at the time it had seemed not just to make sense but to be necessary.

  It was only in the last days, made dazed and senseless by morphine, that her mother started to talk about Ray Eccles. Barely conscious, she would call out his name. Other times she might look at Mira, direct and urgent:

  “Where’s Ray?”

  “Bring Ray, Mira, I want to see him.”

  “You will look after Ray, won’t you?”

  Mira knew the name, she knew he had been someone important to her mother and father and that he had lived with them for a time, but she barely remembered him beyond a vague presence: kindly, benign, out of bounds. She didn’t act on her mother’s requests. What could she do? Many things were said, and much of it made little or no sense, plus there wasn’t time now. But afterwards, quite a long time afterwards, months after she’d freed herself from Gregoire du Feu, she came across a newspaper cutting while sorting through her mother’s things. It was a task she attacked sporadically and listlessly. Whole days could be consumed by a box of cuttings like this: reading one, setting it aside, lying back and staring at the ceiling for a while, hours maybe; reading another; unfolding the brittle pages; folding them up again; eventually getting to the end without any clearer idea of what to do with them; putting them all back in the box; noticing that it had got dark outside. But this particular cutting was different.

  Both men apparently remain ignorant (as does Grace) as to which of them is the biological father. “We all love, care for, and look after Mira. It doesn’t help to start labelling people—this man is your father, this man is not. I don’t know myself and I don’t care.”

  Well, she did. She cared. Maybe she wasn’t completely alone in the world after all.

  It freaked people out that she had no parents. Her fellow students at Central Staint Martins, where Gregoire du Feu had persuaded her to enrol on a course, couldn’t imagine that much loss. They didn’t want to, either, and avoided getting too close. She was popular though, for she was beautiful and rich and had connections in the art world, as well as her own flat overlooking Green Park. She took to throwing parties, or allowing them to happen, and it would be two or three days before the last slow and stupefied stragglers left. She liked them, her peers, the way their bodies filled up her flat, but she didn’t know them and she didn’t care to. She had nothing in common with them. She didn’t drink beer or do drugs or fuck anyone her own age. There had been others after Gregoire, mostly friends of George and Grace’s, other collectors or owners of small commercial galleries, men who felt a vague responsibility for her but couldn’t help themselves. They weren’t like Gregoire though. They touched her body with trepidation as if worried it might break, and afterwards expressed fatherly concern. “You should sell this place. Too many memories. I could help you, it’s worth a lot of money you know.”

  Tom was her attempt to kick the habit. He was a boy in her year who had stayed on after a party. She’d been sitting in the kitchen when he’d come in and offered to make her a coffee. She’d assented absent-mindedly, but when he presented it to her on the kitchen table it was a thing of such beauty that she looked at him properly for the first time, noticing his pale green eyes and the neat little dimple in his chin. He’d found one of Grace’s special powder-blue coffee cups that Mira had forgotten existed. The coffee was fresh and black, little creamy islands still whirling and settling on the surface from the pour. She had no idea where he’d got it from, as her own cupboards were practically bare. On the saucer was a small, shiny spoon, and by the side a little white jug filled with warm milk. No one had ever given her anything so lovely. She determined to try and fall in love with this boy.

  “Do you want to come with me to Southend today? I have a house there.”

  He wanted to know her. On the train he sat opposite her, leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees. The scenery was flat and unremarkable until they reached the edges of the estuary, where the mudflats, cleaved by tiny rivulets and made gleaming and voluptuous by the sun, had a sensual beauty.

  “My father grew up here.”

  “Someone told me your parents—”

  “Were dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother died on my eighteenth birthday. But my father’s still alive, I just haven’t seen him in a while. He left when I was little.”

  “Mine too.”

  “He’s an artist. An Outsider Artist. Do you know what that means?”

  Tom said he did, but she told him anyway.

  “They’re artists who don’t see themselves as artists. Untrained and urged to create by something other than a desire to exhibit or achieve recognition. Often they’re loonies, but my dad isn’t. He was just an ordinary guy, worked in an office, and then for some reason became obsessed with this woman he saw on the beach.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No. But my mother discovered him. He came to live with her in London, at my flat. I was born not long after. It was his, the house we’re visiting.”

  She didn’t tell him anything else. He must have been expecting a normal house. Mira had no real idea herself what she might find. Her mother had been terribly disorganized but Mira had managed to uncover a set of keys with a label on: No. 8. It had to be them.

  They left the train at Shoeburyness and got a taxi from the station. The roads were empty, the sky too. Not a cloud. The modest, neat houses, mostly bungalows with driveways, drifted soporifically past the window as they twisted through the suburban maze. Picturesque white signs held high on poles announced the names of the streets and eventually Mira spotted it: Belvedere Close. The car pulled in and slowed as the driver searched the numbers, stopping outside a small, square, brown brick bungalow.

  “This is it,” said Mira, as they stood on the pavement, the car drawing away behind them.

  “Does anyone live here now?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The curtains were closed, but other than that the house didn’t stand out among the others in the street. A small driveway, a patch of grass, a low wall interrupted by a gate which opened onto a gently curving path to the brown front door.

  Mira looked around but there was no one else about. Despite having the keys she felt herself a trespasser, although she was trying her best to appear at ease in front of Tom.

  “Come on,” she said, starting along the path towards the door.

  In contrast to the brightness of the day, it was unusually dark inside. Tom closed t
he door behind him and the two of them stood side by side, their shoulders just touching in the narrow hallway. She felt like a little child. They both were children, their innocent touch like brother and sister. Hansel and Gretel. It was clear at once that this was no normal house, although the lack of light prevented them from seeing anything in particular to suggest it at first. There was a certain smell, not altogether unpleasant but far from domestic. Ancient and cold, like a cave. Mira moved forward and opened a door into a room, a sitting room. Her eyes were growing accustomed now and the sun pushing through the thick curtain fabric was enough to make visible the room’s contents: a sofa, an armchair, a low table, a standing lamp, a small rug on the patterned carpet. Everything drab and old-fashioned but clean and somehow deliberately placed, like a museum display of how people used to live. She noticed now the walls, which had some kind of covering over them. She reached out her hand and touched it, a white plastic sheet, skin-thin, beneath which her fingers could feel the lumpen surface of the wall. A gentle tug revealed it was fixed, with pins maybe, along the top and sides of the wall, and it didn’t take much more force to bring it down altogether, the whole sheet billowing jellyfish-like to the floor.